No, I haven’t been kicked out of the house though at $120 a month for a 1000 sq ft place it would be a steal to live in (though I would soon get tired of having no water I suppose), but the plane building project has graduated from garage to hangar. The fuselage kit is coming in a week and there just isn’t room to continue in the house.

I enjoy posting on Twitter and, although one shouldn’t microblog for the attention, it is nice when someone responds to something. I have a small group of 6 or 7 people who regularly say something to me and I appreciate the sense of community that brings. But 90% of my followers never say a word to me so I wonder why do they follow me at all?

A lot of these people are pilots so surely they’d be interested in my aviation related tweets? But no, my ten year pilot anniversary got not a single congrats, I toured the largest ATC facility in the world and no one was interested. Same with my plane building updates.

If I take a look at some of my pilot “buddies” I find comments about a pretty bird on a Cessna windshield gets a conversation of 20 tweets, an “I’m washing the plane” gets a load more.

So today I’m unfollowing a lot of people who don’t care what I write. It seems kind of petty but I don’t need to feel like the unwanted leper (are there wanted lepers??) online as well as in the “real” world.

Took a short flight last week and if by some chance you don’t subscribe to my flying blog, friend me on Facebook, or follow me on Twitter and missed it, here it is. Next flight I’ll get the camera mount sorted out so I don’t have to do it by hand.

I suspect that most of you aren’t following along with my plane building log so I thought I would report on passing our first (or maybe that is second?) milestone: completion of the slats.
The slats attach to the front of each wing and serve to allow the plane to fly at much slower speeds without stalling. This gives us the plane’s impressive (100ft) takeoff and landing distances. There are actually only two slats, when the wings are complete we will join pairs of slats together to form just one on each side. Now that the slats are complete, we have started on the flaperons.

You can see all the slats related pictures on the Flickr set but here are a few to give you a flavour.

Yeah, so I’ve posted this everywhere but I just love it. Lucky Matt gets to sing with Rihanna and the poor boy looks like a deer stuck in the headlights when she comes out. He can’t decide if he can touch her or not…. Cute and hot all at the same time.

(You may have noticed that this blog has kinda died, I’m posting most things on my tumblr or Facebook, not sure there will be much to see here going forward)

Today I was flying to San Francisco and while walking through the departure area the boarding pass of a guy sat near the newsstand caught my eye: it said Paul Sanders on it. I thought what is the chance of that! So I circled around and got a better look – he was on the same flight as me. Now, the chances of that really are amazing. So amazing that I decided to point this out to him.

Not sure English was his first language or at least listening to (English) English wasn’t hs thing and he protested that no his name was (something garbled). I pointed to the name on my boarding pass and the name on his and said “same!” and he nodded, and I walked away.

Standing in line to get on the plane he was just ahead of me and that’s when I started to worry. This all started to seem way too coincidental! Had I been picked to be the innocent victim while my namesake took part in act of terror? They scanned my boarding pass and I was denied. Crap.

I had to go back to the checkin desk and explain it, he called the guy at the gate and said stop boarding you need to get the other guy off the plane. The desk guy showed me a boarding pass in the name of Fred Sadners, saying this is the guy who walked onto the plane as me. The theory is that he had asked for a boarding pass reprint and the agent had printed out mine and given it to him.

Anyway, I was told to go to the plane and as I walked down the aisle I met my “namesake” coming back up. Shortly after I was seated he came back on the plane.

This week I had to renew my FAA 3rd Class Medical Certificate, an event that has to happen every two years once you get over 40, 40 being the official age from which everything goes downhill it seems. Everything was groovy until the vision test which I knew was going to be a toughie. I’ve had 20/20 vision all my life until the last couple of years. People told me that my eyesight would do downhill rapidly at 40 which I thought was kinda silly, everyone is different. But it seems not, my near vision has taken quite a hit in the last couple of years.

So I get to the eye machine and to my amazement I can read the bottom line each time, I’m doing great! But then the doc says “now for the near vision test”, first slide and I could feel my eyes go every which way but focussed. After my fail the doctor welcomed me to the “long arm club”. I got my certificate but it has been endorsed with “Must have available near vision correction lenses”. I think I am officially old.

Thought I’d share my latest, um, pastime – I’m going to try building my own plane, and so I’ve created a website for it:
Not sure if I have the skill, time or money to get it done but we’ll find out, click on the image to go to the site and subscribe for the day by day progress.

There’s also a Flickr collection that will carry photos as I take them. I’m currently about a third of the way through the rudder but the project is on hold while I go to the UK for some work and some vacation.

Today marks 41 years since Neil Armstrong took that first step onto the moon’s surface. Which made me think of this great bit from Eddie Izzard:

They went to the Moon and they brought back rock. Trouble is, we’ve got rock. That was the one thing we didn’t need, wasn’t it? “Rock, Neil? I don’t know whether you looked at the planet before you took off, but it’s made of fucking rock!” “But it’s Moon rock …” “Oh, fucking hell, this is Earth rock, Neil, come on! Have you heard, on the stock market, rock’s gone up three points? No, it hasn’t, has it? ‘Cause it’s fucking rock!”